For the love of old things

BY ALICIA BESSETTE

It's a room about 24 years in the making. That's how long Dick and Ann Williams have been antiquing. Many of their treasures, from old Ovaltine cans to a wood and metal onion planter, are displayed in a loft above their garage, a space converted to suggest a general store from a bygone era, an era when boys in knickers straddled chrome barstools and ordered malted milkshakes in the corner drugstore.

It's a room few have seen, save members of the Rutland Historical Society, who were privy to a viewing recently.

It's a room out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

The Williams' private second-floor sanctuary is a tribute to their love of old things. They started antiquing in the early 1980s, after discovering a mutual love for the hobby. They became regulars at the Brimfield Antique Fair and continue to scope out flea markets all over New England.

"I could go on e-Bay and get the best," Dick says. "But I don't want to do that. It's the hunt of the trade that I like."

Most of their antiques could be categorized as advertising memorabilia. Old irons were the first things Ann collected, for no special reason. Then she turned to hatboxes.

Dick Williams stands behind the counter at the general store he and his wife Ann have recreated over the years. "It just grew from there," she says. "We're pickier now, but we weren't very picky when we first started."

Milk bottles were the first collectibles Dick searched for. Now his favorite items are tinker toys. "Very rare do you see them," he says. He supposes he has about 300 to 400 tubes in all.

As the Williamses know, there's nothing like an antique to capture the imagination, and connect one to the past.

"Take this little oil can, for example," Dick says, retrieving from a shelf a tin object, not unlike a watering can. "I stop and wonder, now what the heck is going on with this thing? Who owned it, and what did they do with it?"

Turns out washing machines, in the 1920s and 1930s, were gas operated, and turned on with a kick-start. The little can stored fuel to run the washer.

Dick calls it his vacation, the sunny room with warm hardwood floors. It's no wonder; any one of the hundreds of objects there inspires the mind to wander.